Other Resort Cities (16 page)

“I really appreciate your help,” Richard said. “That was a tight one.” They were sitting on a bench outside the courthouse in Van Nuys. It was November, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, and the air was damp and cold. Days like this always reminded Richard of being in Paris with Amy when they were kids, acting crazy in the streets surrounding Sacre Coeur, him already high at age twelve or thirteen, hanging out with artists and hash heads, acting cool; Amy just happy to watch out for him, the two of them such different species. Shit.
Van Nuys. Like Paris in November
. That was the kinda shit that made him steal.

“How did it feel sitting in County for two weeks for ink?” Amy said. “Ink. Unreal.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Richard began, but Amy cut him off before he could finish.

“You know, you’ll be forty in five years, and you still act like everything just shines right off of you.”

“I said thank you,” Richard said, standing up. He dug into his pocket and found a pack of smokes, lit one up and started walking away. This was a conversation they’d had before, and Richard knew enough that he didn’t want to have it again, especially since they had it at twenty-five and thirty as well. It was like a five-year warranty that expired directly after particularly stupid crimes.

“No,” Amy said, calling after him, “you didn’t say thank you. You said you appreciated my help. There’s a difference.”

Richard turned back and faced his sister then, startled to see she was near tears. “What do you want me to do, Amy?”

“Stop fucking up,” she said. “Stop being such a fuckup.”

He’d meant to flick his cigarette in resignation. He’d meant to flick it and walk off wordlessly, holding firm to the last bits of dignity he thought he possessed. Instead, standing there, he finally figured it out. Amy hadn’t told him what was coming that morning seventeen years earlier because she thought he deserved it. No. No.
Needed
it. And what good had come?

So he told his sister to stop being such a fucking cunt, to stop hogging all of the air with her sanctimonious bullshit, because better people deserved to breathe and that she should fuck off . . . and then he flicked his cigarette, and it landed in her hair, and now, three months later, he was sitting at his kitchen table needing her more than ever.

Spread out before Richard was the final will and testament of his dead father, Richard “Deuce” Charsten II, former owner of the Seattle Mariners, former shipping magnate, former coffee impresario; former living, breathing, cocksucker who booted his lone son out on his ass at eighteen in order to for his boy to “earn it on his own.” The good news,
Richard saw, was that he was the rightful heir to approximately $250 million dollars, plus property and stock interests that nearly doubled that amount. Unfortunately, in order to claim his money, he’d need to handle one small bit of business in the next ten days that, Richard realized in sinking horror, was simply not possible. It was right there in plain legal English:

It heartened Richard that his father was so irresponsible that he actually failed to update his will since the death of Richard’s mother in 1996, though Richard figured old Deuce probably imagined he’d live forever and that the will was just something perfunctory to appease some estate planner in his firm.

The more pressing issue was that the Seattle Kingdome, in an act of tremendous grace, was imploded in 2000. From the outside, the Kingdome had looked vaguely space age—like a standing set from
Logan’s Run
had impregnated Space Mountain—but the inside was positively disco, right down to the hideous artificial turf that was basically cement covered
with green fabric. Richard still had a scar on the small of his back from trying to slide on it in 1981, when he’d served as the Mariners’ batboy over the course of his tenth summer. It would have been fun if the players hadn’t hated his father so much, though not many other kids or adults could say they’d been spit on by men enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Reverie aside, Richard was smart enough to realize this was a big fucking problem. The idea of possessing his father’s ashes for any length of time was troubling enough, but the proviso that they be dumped inside the Kingdome was beginning to make him sweat behind his knees.

Well, he decided, he’d just do the right thing and call the person in charge, see what could be done, see if there was a deal to be made,
try
to make this work out well for everyone. He flipped to the front of the packet and reread the cover letter, which was, it seemed, a rather simple bit of correspondence signed by a lawyer named Calvin Woods. Richard pictured in his mind the kind of person Calvin Woods might be: probably about Richard’s age, probably of a similar caste (at least initially), and now probably just as dissatisfied with his life as Richard was. If there was one certainty Richard picked up during the last seventeen years, it was that everyone wanted something better or, alternately, everyone wanted something less so that they could get home at a decent hour, kick off their shoes, watch
American Idol
, and fall asleep on their own schedule.

Calvin Woods would be a reasonable man, would understand the predicament Richard faced and make it right. And didn’t Richard deserve a little grace here?

After rolling through a series of receptionists and secretaries, Calvin Woods finally answered the phone in the
way all lawyers seemed to these days, by announcing his own name as a greeting: “Calvin Woods.”

“Yes,” Richard said, “hello. This is Richard Charsten. How are you today?”

“I’m fine, Mr. Charsten,” Calvin said. Richard noted a definite lilt in his voice that indicated a level of annoyance. “I presume you received your father’s will today.”

“Yes, yes,” Richard said. For some reason, Richard felt like he was being examined and recorded, which immediately sent him into what he considered his Upper Crust Mode, where he was all apologies and thank-yous and practiced civility, all staples of a previous life. “So sorry to bother you on this, Calvin,” he said. “But I noticed a trivial issue here in the will that I thought we could rectify if you have just a moment of free time.”

“I presume you’re speaking of the Kingdome clause,” Calvin said.

“Yes, yes, thank you,” Richard said. The sound of his own voice was beginning to grate on Richard, the false civility, the undue thanks. He wasn’t really sure where this persona came from as he sure as fuck couldn’t remember his father thanking anyone for anything, while his mother was more the kind who expected people to thank her for her mere presence on Earth, as if being a socialite was some kind of ordained position.

“Well,” Calvin said, “I’m afraid there’s not much that can be done. Your father went back over his will shortly after your sister died and didn’t make any changes. What you see is what he wanted.”

“You’re not hearing me,” Richard said, and for the first time, he thought he actually heard his real voice pinging in
his head. “That shit is my birthright, okay? That shit is mine by the word of the fucking law. He blew up the Kingdome himself. I saw him flip the ignition on ESPN. Why would he want his ashes spread somewhere that didn’t exist? Okay? Why would he keep that in his will unless he was, you know, temporarily insane or something? You hear what I’m saying?”

“Maybe,” Calvin said, “he didn’t want you to get the money, Mr. Charsten.”

Cruelty, Richard understood, after he called Calvin Woods an ass-fucking cocksucker and hung up on his uppity ass, wasn’t an activity born out of necessity, but out of benign indifference: other people simply weren’t as important. It was a lesson Richard learned in community college, jail, and marriage but which never failed to rearrange the way he looked at the world. It was true that Richard had, on occasion, felt the same way in the process of stealing identities or stealing cars or stealing the contents of an entire home from some Beverly Hills asshole (and Richard made sure of this: he didn’t steal from people worse off than himself ), but with the simple proviso that people of better circumstances were the non-important ones. And yet, he felt like even in death Deuce was sticking it to him. And for what? Not being Amy? Not being Trey to his Deuce? There was something else, though, some hope that this Calvin character simply didn’t know what he was talking about. If Deuce didn’t want Richard to have the money
now,
he certainly hadn’t wanted him to have it in 1996, either. Or any of the intervening years, so why not correct the fucking thing to say that Richard was out all together? No, that money was his.

It took Richard a full day to come to grips with the possibilities attached to the station in life he was primed to lose yet again. It wasn’t just the $250 million dollars—Richard was confident even he couldn’t screw up $250 million dollars—it was the minutia of other valuables now in his name, provided he could turn up a domed baseball stadium sometime in the next nine days. Of most interest to Richard was his father’s childhood home in Sarasota, Florida.

He couldn’t remember ever stepping foot in the home, his grandparents having died when he was just a toddler, but merely seeing the address evoked a kind of muted sadness. Whenever Deuce wanted to prove a point to Richard (never to Amy as Amy pretty much sharpened points as her life’s work) he’d drag out a crinkled old photo of the place or, if a photo wasn’t available, a crinkled old memory, and would regale Richard with the bullet points of his hard-luck past, all of which added up to the simple phrase:
I had to earn it, Richard
. It was true, Richard knew. His father had earned enough to even own his past.

Still, when Richard opened his front door that morning and a messenger handed him his father’s remains, housed handsomely inside a platinum urn that was likely more valuable than anything Richard had ever owned or filched, he couldn’t help but notice how light the contents were. At most, his father weighed five pounds. It was a wonder to Richard that a man of his father’s cosmic weight could be cooked down to this final compound.

He brought the urn over to his coffee table and set it down next to a stack of magazines and newspapers that all bore notices of his father’s passing. The owner of the
Yankees called Deuce “a true pioneer” while the commissioner of baseball mentioned a legacy of “hard bargaining” and the owner of the A’s remembered how Deuce “always found the loophole and was as driven on the golf course as he was in the front office.” Richard’s childhood hero, the former Mariner First Baseman Alvin Bradley, said that Deuce was “the first person to show faith in my abilities.”

When Richard read these plaudits, the first thought that occurred to him was that it was like reading an algebraic equation where the answer is given but the path to the answer remains mysterious. He’d seen the Yankees’ owner actually slap his father. The commissioner of baseball, back when he still owned the Brewers, once left a message with an eleven-year-old Richard that started, “Tell your asshole of a father that I demand a call back.” He was also fairly certain that the owner of the A’s had slept with his mother simply out of revenge. Alvin Bradley? Well, good old Alvin had been one of Richard’s best clients in the late ’90s, back when he was moving crank in and out of Phoenix, and had told him on more than one occasion that it was Richard’s father who got him hooked on uppers back in the day.

Of course Deuce was also lauded for his philanthropy, particularly for breast cancer awareness (which had claimed Richard’s mother) and his role in helping to open up shipping lines to China, and his sentient move into the coffee business back when people were still paying fifty cents for a refillable cup.

The weird thing was, prior to receiving the will, Richard hadn’t really felt much of anything about his father’s passing other than a troubling sense of relief. He’d tried to cry a little bit when the news first hit. He was watching SportsCenter in
bed, where he’d been spending much of his days and nights since his sister passed, and the anchors did their grave faces and muted tones bit before flashing a photo of Deuce with the dates of his life typed neatly beneath his chin. The first thing he thought was,
That’s no good
. And then he thought,
I should cry
. And then he tried to do just that, but nothing came. He pictured his sister in her casket—something he didn’t actually see as her husband called him and told him to stay away—and that brought the tears, but once he tried to transfer them to his father . . . nothing.

But now, with his father resting in peace on his bongwater stained coffee table, he couldn’t shake the sense that he sort of wanted to crawl into the urn with him, or at least grab a handful of his ashes tight between his hands, to let his father know that he wasn’t alone. Why else would he have wanted his ashes spread out over a domed baseball diamond—particularly one with artificial surface, which meant he was likely to be vacuumed up or sucked into the dome’s ventilation system and spit back out into downtown Seattle—unless he was afraid of being alone?

The first time Richard was arrested, when he was nineteen, his father actually came down to the Manhattan Beach jail to bail him out, but not before asking the cop on duty at the boutique cop shop to show him his son’s cell. Deuce stood there for a good ten minutes just staring at his son and the eight by eight slab of concrete Richard was drying out in. Richard remembered well the pained look on his father’s face, as if he were the one who’d spent the night trying to sleep on the piss-smelling institutional mat.